For Heaven’s sake! God willing! God forbid! Praise the Lord! And, more recently, OMG! All are expressions we hear and read on a daily basis. They might have had some significance when they were coined, but have since become such a part of the idiom as to be functionally meaningless.
So, what is God?
Back before science took hold of our civilization, primitive peoples, marveling at the enormity of the ocean, stunned by phenomena like the daily rising of the sun and the moon, thunder and lightning, the tides, etc., invented “gods” to explain the unexplainable. And, once this practice was established, it was impossible to get rid of, irrespective of the mounting logical and scientific evidence to the contrary. Well, then, maybe not a bunch of gods, but one All-Mighty, Omnipotent and Omniscient. God with a capital “G.”
Then, we invented new religions to explain why the old god, in whose image we were told we were created, was allowing calamities to befall us. I won’t go into the character or (god forbid) sanity of the founders of the major Western religions, but suffice it to say that anyone today who claims to have gotten instructions from god immediately has a net thrown over him, is diagnosed as psychotic and locked safely away. I'm not saying they were psychotic, only that, in my 21st-century frame of reference, they do appear to have been crazy.
I've heard the argument that, without the rules that religion imposes, we'd be stealing, murdering, raping and committing a whole litany of other atrocious activities. But, over the course of our journey as a species, every possible ethical and moral norm has been exercised: Human sacrifice, communal property, sibling marriages, no marriages, one God, many gods, animal gods, no gods.
Voltaire opined, "If there were no god, it would have been necessary to invent him." I submit, based on ample evidence readily at hand, that we have, in fact, invented and reinvented the concept and aspect of god over and over and over again, ad nauseam.
I'm not saying that there is no god, or, like Nietzsche, that “God is Dead.” Only that, if there is a god/gods, we are most assuredly not created in his/her/its image. How amazingly egocentric is it to claim that in the entire universe, which encompasses at least 100 sextillion stars and, probably, trillions of other life forms, we are the ones crated in god's image?
But, I'll even go you one better. How about the politicians (clergy, holy rollers, etc.), who claim to pray for and get guidance from god? And we’re supposed to buy into the concept that that this god is actually listening to and cares about Congressman Frog and what he/she/it decides?
And, what about hell, a most cherished concept of Christianity? If it exists (and there are significant variations among these aforementioned Western religions), it's where we are all bound. After all, the Catholics, Muslims and Jews all think that only they (or at least the best of theirs) is on the way to their version of heaven and the rest of us go directly to hell without, mind you, either passing “go” or collecting our $200. By this definition, we're all bound for hell.
So, as the song by Carl Sigman goes, "Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think."
Dave Bresler is the president and founder of the popular business networking group NetworkNetwork!, which is based in New York City.
From New York City
So, What is God?
By Dave Bresler